Organizations are investing heavily in AI to improve productivity, accelerate innovation, and deliver measurable value. Yet many will unintentionally undermine those investments before they ever reach scale.
This is not a traditional best-practices article. Think of it instead as a tongue-in-cheek guide to ensuring your AI rollout falls short of expectations.
If your organization has already built confidence, supported managers through change, and achieved meaningful adoption with measurable ROI, this guide is not for you.
If not, the steps that follow will show you exactly how expensive that gap can become.
Step 1: Announce it with an email.
Nothing signals the magnitude of a historic organizational shift like a 250-word note from a VP most employees have never met. Make sure the subject line is something appropriately inspiring like “Exciting AI Updates!” Use the word “leverage” at least twice. Close with “please reach out with any questions” knowing full well that no one will, because they learned in 2019 that reaching out with questions goes nowhere.
For bonus points, send it on a Friday afternoon 😉
Your employees will read it, nod slowly, and immediately go back to doing their jobs exactly the way they have always done them. This is the outcome you want.
Step 2: Appoint change champions nobody has heard of.
The key here is the selection criteria. You want people with the right titles — not the right credibility. Avoid anyone who is actually embedded in day-to-day operations, trusted by their peers, or known for telling the truth in difficult meetings. Those people will ask inconvenient questions.
What you want is a list of names that looks impressive in a slide deck and ideally, 90% of them should work in roles adjacent enough to the front line that they have no idea what the front line is actually experiencing.
Brief them once. Give them a PDF. Trust the message will cascade down.
Step 3: Measure logins.
This is the critical step. Every important initiative needs a metric, and logins are a metric, so: done. Someone opened the platform. Someone clicked a button. The button was clicked in the building. This is adoption.
Definitely do not ask what people are actually doing once they log in. Please do not ask whether they trust the output. Do not ask whether their manager has ever mentioned the tool in a one-on-one. And do not — under any circumstances — ask whether they think AI is coming for their job, because that is a conversation that requires a leader who is equipped to hear and understand their team, and we have not gotten there yet.
Your quarterly review will show a very satisfying upward line. The line is real. What it measures is not.
Step 4: Train everyone on the tool. Only the tool.
Prompt engineering. Interface navigation. Use case library. All of it. This is the investment. Your people will complete the modules, receive their certificates, and return to their managers — who will have received zero preparation for the conversation that is about to happen — and ask the question every employee is actually asking right now:
“What does this mean for me?”
At this point your manager, who is talented and well-intentioned and completely unsupported, will say something like “great question, I think we’re all still figuring it out” and move on to the next agenda item. Your employee will interpret this as confirmation of everything they feared. Your manager will go home and send a Teams message to HR that says “people are asking questions I don’t know how to answer” which will be added to a growing thread that nobody has time to address.
The certificate, however, is valid for 12 months.
Step 5: When resistance shows up, train harder.
People are not adopting at the rate you projected. Utilization is plateauing. A few of your strongest performers have gone quiet in meetings. One of them just updated their LinkedIn profile.
The answer is clear: another training.
Maybe a lunch and learn. Maybe an AI ambassador program. Maybe a fireside chat with someone from the AI vendor. What is definitely not the answer is pausing to ask whether your managers have the capability and the psychological safety to lead their teams through genuine uncertainty — or whether your employees feel like this is happening to them rather than for them — because that would require a different kind of investment entirely, and the budget for that was not in the original business case.
Send the calendar invite. Pick a catchy title. Use the word “empower.”
The organizations getting real ROI from AI right now did not follow these steps. They made a different bet — that the technology would only perform as well as the human leadership conditions surrounding it. They built both. At the same time. On purpose.
The ones still waiting for the login numbers to turn into outcomes are five steps deep into a guide they did not know they were following.
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